Charles Taylor Lecture: A More Adequate Narrative of Western Secularity

good afternoon and welcome to many of you welcome back my name is Tom Bancho I'm director of the Berkeley Center for religion peace and world affairs here at Georgetown and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to the third installment of this year's Berkeley lectures with Charles Taylor under the topic narratives of secularity we're in the middle of a conversation with Professor Taylor I'm not going to interrupt it with an extended introduction I would say that he is known to us of course through his tremendous scholarship as many works I think of sources of the self I think of his new book a secular age but professor Taylor's also known to us those who've been reading his work those have had a chance to interact with him this week as someone who asks the big questions doesn't promise clear answers but I think most importantly invites us to ask those questions to try to answer those questions with him who reaches out to us in conversation and it's just a wonderful event this week to be able to have this extended conversation with him and with you the Berkeley Center lectures in this year's lectures in particular really flow into the work of our Center which as I mentioned a couple of days ago is just two and a half years old really just getting started part of an effort across Georgetown to look at how religion intersects with different spheres with the humanities with the Social Sciences to be part of this collaborative effort this ongoing conversation designed to make sense of this new world we're all a part of that is so marked by religious and cultural pluralism so thank you all for being here and without any further delay professor charles taylor thanks very much I'm going to try to pick up the story where I left it yesterday in the attempt to give my narrative Huff secularity of how the secular age we now know arose so a very important part a very important role for me is played by very big change in our what I call social imaginary now this is a word that I borrowed I stole from cornelius castoriadis and using a significant sense i mean by that the collector understanding that people in our society have of just how we related together in our society how we got to be that way and I call it an imaginary as against a theory because a lot of it for a lot of people is not very clearly formulated in theoretical terms it's a kind of implicit understanding and it of course as the implicit understanding it's what makes sense of various practices that we that we carry out together and so to a great degree our sense of our position in relation to other people and so on is carried in our being able to function in certain social practices with them and not necessarily formula that's why I call it a social imaginary well now I was building up to this yesterday and I talked about the talked about the what I call the imminent frame that is the sense that we now have as against our ancestors that we live in a world which can be on the workings of which can be understood in purely purely intra worldly terms that is there is still a sense of a possible transcendent and mostly in our cases in our civilization it's a theistic one it's the existence of God creating the world and beyond the world that's obviously a question and option which many people accept many people reject but there is this notion that the world we live in let's call it the imminent in a world that needs the transcendent world it's really explicable in its own terms and this is something I want to argue in a minute that is rare in history I think probably you know modern Western civilization is the first to make a really clear cut but I'll try to explain that by going deeper into our ideas of social order which I was coming up to or beginning to talk about yesterday a notion of a social order which although as social imaginary it's not a theoretical idea in a very strange way perhaps a game peculiar to our civilization started off as a theory that is the lineaments of the story we're first articulated in a very famous set of theories of social contract theory is the modern natural law theories unthink particularly of two figures of grossest and of in a block and let's look at that at the lineaments of that story in order to get a sense of how we understand our own social life well the basic idea is that society is made up of individuals now this is carried of course in these theories by what appears to us today to be a mythical component the idea of an original social contract and it's not entirely clear how much these great theorists actually saw that as something more than a family myth though Locke does have certain passages where he seems to take it seriously but the serious point of it is this notion that normatively the society has to be seen as made up of individuals why do I say normatively because the underlying sense of the proper moral order what makes a society legitimate or excellent is is that it is a kind of order in which individuals seeking their own good can nevertheless not only coexist but actually in a certain sense help each other they there their attempt to seek their own life goals can in a properly constructed order read down to the benefit of others and I mentioned yesterday the name is smithy an idea of the invisible hand as an example of this as a way in which that could be that idea could be cashed out right so you can see how the notion of contract carries two very fundamental normative ideas which it still retains even after with figures like Kant or Biggers like Rawls or old figures we know around us it's admitted simply to be a as if story just so story or as if as if concept the two I two fundamental ideas are that social orders are constructed by human beings political orders are constructed by human beings and secondly that the benchmark of their excellent success legitimacy have we ought to put it is that they ensure to individuals protection and prosperity and above all that they allow for this feature I'm going to call the mutual benefit that the action of each resounds to the mutual benefit of others now the thing is I mean it's so crashing the obvious I'm almost ashamed to have spent two-and-a-half minutes on it but that's the point that's my point I mean if you go back two and a half centuries ago it wasn't like that at all not at all I mean the very powerful ideas of social and political order were not thought to be constructed I mean one case perhaps the two most important ones raining up till the well middle of the 18th century it's hard to get a cut-off point exactly but clearly raining in the 16th and 17th centuries or in one hand one which saw the social order as embedded in some way in the cosmic order there's a certain are cute of levels of being and the social order reflects that with concepts like for instance the Kings two bodies as an empirical King dies and succeeded by another empirical King and so on but there is on another level the Kings maternal body the this if you like this function exists is embodied in some way outside of time so you could say the king is dead long live the king this it can be said in the same breath because the Kings second eternal body it lives forever and in this notion of order we get us a sense also that the order is not only is that we're already there but it that it in a certain sense operates to restore itself if you try to return it or unhinge it if you try to take that which belongs properly underneath and put it on top of that which belongs properly on top you get the sense that the order itself will resist you can see this again and again but I mean I think the examples from Macbeth are are wonderful because you get these terrible events that occur the night before Duncan is about to be killed I mean that's the most terrible upsetting order the subject space the monarch and so people report that strange cries were heard in the night that the horses reared against human beings that this notion that the order of things is deeply embedded in the very warped and move of the cosmos and it will it was at work respond to attempts to upset it by making it restoring it again or by wreaking vengeance on those who try to upset it or another very very common notion of order another kind is the notion of the in English anglo-saxon terms Anglo Sloan terms which apply to the background of this society the ancient constitution the notion or the notion of a law the Lord has been our loss since time out of mind and there may be some idea of moment in some kind of higher time in which that was originally founded about Icarus or whoever it was but this is something which is there and has always been there and which we have to return to once more it's not something which is seen just as made and remake about at will by us and it's very interesting that in the early periods of social turmoil and even revolution in modern Europe the references for revolutionary action what we think of as revolutionary action we're backward-looking they were looking to restore the proper order when the parliament rebelled against Charles the first they said proper terms we are attacking the king small K in the name of the whole Constitution including the king large K I mean because the Kings you know eternal body is part of the Constitution we're not denying core safe got carried away after is this we will know and and the order of things was in place because the birth anyway they were overturned after after they did that terrible deed of killing the mark but anyway but they the the sense of why we rebuilding was something which is fundamentally backward-looking and the same thing with the American colonies at the beginning that they are fighting for the rights of Englishmen already that Englishmen have since time out of mind that are being violated by the Westminster Parliament and and the king across the ocean and what's interesting in the process of that revolution and then the Constitution building is that you get one of those important inaugural moments when the new modern consciousness gets entrenched because the actual making of the Constitution involves the Federal Constitution I'm talking about this you know 1787 one not just the Articles got there generation but the this serious new political entity which couldn't simply see itself as a continuation of the earlier entities colonies becoming states but is something new is seen as the Constitution as it were is founded on a great speech act which is put in the mouth of this new entity the American people we the people of the United States in order to make a more perfect union that is the beginning of the kind of switchover point I see it one of the switchover points in which it becomes no longer possible to think of orders as already there simply but it becomes normal impossible to think of orders as newly decreed so this you can see that there's been a big a big turnover here which were as I say wits so attuned to the contemporary way of looking at it that we don't even see that this is something something new now this of course shift in social imaginary is very crucial to the story of the development of our civilization but I it's not that I'm trying to make it into its own independent causal factor I mean if you want to make tell the fine-grain story of this which are less I'm not competent to do you have to see how a series of new practices new ways of being entrenched this new social imaginary with its now all really three features that is it's something that starts with individuals that has a constructivist bent the orders are made by concatenations of these individuals and the criterion is something like mutual benefit now this all comes to seem obvious because of many changes in practices I mean changes think of the changes involved in what Stephen Greenblatt call self fashioning the self fashioning of individuals by a series of disciplines and herself changing this individual self fashioning and then the continued building of new political entities even where they start off with the rationale of or just restoring they end up being obviously a new building I mean you can see in your case in the u.s. case that there wasn't an entity there before as the federal unit to be binding force of the different colonies there wasn't it has to be business I mean created anew and there one is into one becomes clearly into the business of of making and so gradually we come to see ourselves that way and here's we get where we get what I call two days ago a ratchet effect the older view becomes unrecoverable as a matter of fact when you start to try to explain this to students today you know the great chain of being and so on it's a really tough slog and and it's it's helped by the Magnificent fact that the language remained the same while the concepts changed so the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in the English Constitution he used revolution in the sense of a move around through an orbit where you return to the original starting point right that's because they carefully I mean that's why Locke would never admit he wrote that all of Second Treatise of civil government which says that you were legitimately can overturn they weren't doing that no King James left and expertly left and through the Great Seal in the Thames and so what are they gonna do the King's old I thought the next person William and and they call together Parliament exactly in its traditional form in order to ratify this the idea was we're just simply restoring the order that's been been disturbed and yet now you see we read revolution through the lens of our present social imaginary it's the quintessential act of clearing space in order to make something new and so anyway I can't go into that whole story but what is it relevance does it have for us the relevance it has for us is that what I'm calling the imminent frame is based on a set of these important conceptions of imminence a social order which owes nothing to its embedding in the cosmos or anything beyond I mean it can be in one sense if we look at it through the lens of Providence yes because God as I said the notion God made human beings in such a way that they fit together properly when they adopt natural law that's the way Locke is telling it to us right so in that sense God is part of the story and in Locke's justification God is part of the story because the normative hinge of the whole thing is that we have to do God's will we are his creatures so we have to fulfill his demands on us that's the normative hinge but nevertheless just seen in itself the whole thing is explanatory in purely imminent terms they're these creatures and they human beings and they have certain endowments capacities and desires and goals and it all works out well if they follow this set of prescriptions that are all works up terribly if they don't and you can very easily just move this over and say this is name not God but make sure of this is the way things things are there's a the imminent account similarly the universe has unfolded before the work of people like Newton and so on is again a universe that can be understood in its own terms there again you can see it in a providential framework and see it as made this beautiful universe everything fits together so well but speaks a great artificer and so on but it's still understandable in its own terms you can see that this is something I think this is something quite new in history I mean let's contrast this with one example if you like the Platonic conception of how we understand the world around how we understand the world around us is as the embodiment stanchion of certain ideas certain archetypes and these archetypes are what corresponds to the transcendent in Plato's way of thinking because they are always unchanging write these words keep occurring they're out of time they are not in the flux of things the world the flux of things that goes on around us can only be understood in relation to entities that are outside of that and similarly if you look at almost any traditional view you'll see that there is this if you like the leakage or lack of clear cut between the eminent frame and whatever the civilization considers the higher beings or the higher forces and so on and so on what you have here is something which in a certain sense was a creation something that was constructed as I tried to say earlier but a game with all the reservations I put around that were constructed over time in the course of our civilization and is the Latin Christendom and you can see that it doesn't just come via the bit of story I've told which is about social imaginaries it also comes for a whole lot of you know theological reasons which people have discussed at great great length about the medieval nominalism they the favorable prejudice to the new mechanistic science and the part of people like magnificent and decal for theological reasons because it really entrench the idea of the sovereignty of God the desire to mark a very clear line between nature and grace and so on all these things pushed us towards including theological reasons this very clear demarcation and what that opened up is a possibility with that liberated as a possibility was the possibility to live fully in the social imagined that becalmed also the cosmic imaginary of modern post-newtonian natural science and to live it as all there is you can live it as all there is if you put together two things I was saying yesterday that had to change we had to have an end of the enchanted world and we had to have I went through this long process of describing the alteration in our social imaginary you can see that we created a kind of house if you like I got a imaginary of our world social world in our natural world in which it's possible to live and understand and function and make sense of it all purely imminently and of course now that possibility is open it begins to be occupied and I discussed quickly yesterday how they were different reactions are there some people wanted to draw back and have a very much stronger theology than the providential deist of model and others wanted to go even farther and go entirely outside any kind of ds2 or theistic position and that is the beginning if you like of the second phase of the story I want to tell which is that these reactions these very different reactions very different ways of living in or treating this imminent frame each produced their own kind of counter reaction and in a way which led to very rapid multiplication of possible positions you can mean it would take years and years to trace all this office you can just see some some examples I mean for instance well I like that Peggy D song you know is that all there is or all the refrains or is that all there is but there's a lot of reactions of the kind is that all there is I mean for instance one variant of this picture of the of the imminent frame and the modern social imaginaries the variant we see with Bentham ice utilitarians and so on of course this is not understand the constructive nature of this change it thinks that what we are base is instrumentally rational individuals and now this is finally been liberated by getting rid of all this nonsense on stilts it's been stopping us before so as irrationally instrumentally rational individuals we can see if these rules make sense in order to live together in mutual benefit well for lots of people that man you know take a loo so I mean they take lots and lots of people you could mention all about no it's impossible I mean where is the greatness where is the heroism where is a sense I mean in his case another issue the sense of the capacity for freedom you know really radical sense of purity dependence on on self where is all this fitting and we've got it's got to be something more than this but what's interesting is that immediately this kind of reaction is very understandable right you're wrong I mean we can understand we can emotionally understand it it fractures into if you like a number it goes immediately into a number of different axes because there are some people that he'll carry out this kind of reaction in a purity Orthodox Christian it's saying well that's that's not all there is because there's something more there is salvation that goes beyond that and then there figures like oh so who know mate is kind of deist but in which a great deal of the Orthodox Christian story is entirely sidelined is no original sin it's on is quite different kind of possible solution and then you get others again farther over who will take this up take up or so indeed in a completely I mean Jacobin atheistic mode which all of us be are still hanging on to that supreme and still hanging on to John Jaco you know was a great emotional source for him but others will go go beyond that so you get right away a multiplication of positions that is it's not simply a new position as it were outside of the traditional faith and then our reaction to it going back no I mean that exists but then there are reactions against all the things that are considered inadequate in the new position which carry people in other directions and then there are reactions to that I mean it's a kind of exponential potentially exponential growth or again I mentioned last time let us mention it quickly today again one of the things people could find unsatisfactory in this picture of a world in which we've we work coexist in a pacifistic way they could find what was absent there's any sense of heroism and there's implicit sense that life of total peace for human beings is demeaning it's lowering that they can't exercise their highest capacity for heroism and there again we get that in a form which wants to take us back to the office and age even we get that informed that wants to take us beyond not back to the Austin a team but totally beyond various more pessimistic kinds of liberal doctrine and we all seem to get that in the case of Nietzsche are quite new not entirely new but if he we gave expression to the most powerful expression to this where the Christian history platonic history and liberal history and democratic history is all bundled together that's what you want to smash and and and challenge all they saw this which is leading us to to kneel ISM and so you can see how the what I call the the Nova in a sense of the breaking apart of an original star and the creation of all sorts of new possibilities arises so if you like what I mentioned yet last time dialectic or what is it the interplay between what I call undermining or destabilizing earlier forms and recomposing new forms this donek tea doesn't simply operate any more with it within a series of within a range of if you like faith-based positions but it spreads out beyond that and it doesn't operate simply within faith-based very clearly faith-based and very clearly non faith-based positions either because then there are all these sort of middle positions someone I'd be taught you go where big job you go ends up well I mean you tell me every but it's it's obviously something which has this very powerful spiritual dimension but it's definitely not Orthodox Christianity Orthodox Catholicism or sha sha paths or you know even the coments on but there are so there there's a sense of the multiplication and we're now finally living in an epoch I want to argue where that is that's reached a kind of change of quality becoming a change a change of quantity becoming a change of quality not that you were marks our world as this world of tremendous potential options options for making sense of life on a meeting in life funny purpose in life finding some spiritual spiritual dimension now if that Nova wasn't enough there was another great destabilization I think which our world Western world's lived through and that is the one which in mythical time you can see the 60s in substance the 60s is she kind of mythical I mean the sixties is a mythical time we're gesturing towards events which happened over a lot longer period of time but they're but to somehow the 60s has become our symbol for it and we still haven't digested all this but I would argue that two important features of the which destabilized further were on one hand the generalization to the whole population of an ethic of authenticity which had previously been very important for certain minorities but if you in the cultural world the emphasis on finding oneself the notion that every human being has their own way of being human and that one has to discover it and be true to it and that the danger is the negative of this that's constantly threatening yet the danger is that you simply take over a mold that's been given to you by your parents by your society by conformist institutions so and you betray yourself and don't really realize your your your potential so they herder articulates this you know everybody human being has his or her own measure mass and that is an idea which you find very powerfully in the Romantic period it is of course it expresses one of the really crucial ideas of romantic art with that this one must above all the original something new but now spills over into life and you find it invoked by in in popular culture you know do your own thing and incredible number of expressions which only makes sense in this kind of in this kind of context that's I'm calling the ethic of authenticity and along with that one gets kind of sexual revolution which is not only a matter of challenging the previous limits of of sexual behavior because in a sense that didn't happen quite only in the 60s either you see because you can see it to the twenties you can see something like this moving ahead earlier but something qualitatively different happens in the 60s which is the like interweaving of this ethic of authenticity and a sexual revolution so that certain important issues of sexual morality get transferred to a different register right so let's take if you like homosexuality as an example instead of arguing well I mean should they be allowed to do it between consenting adults or maybe allowed to let it appear a little bit provided they don't bother other people and so on the issue suddenly shifts around homosexuality can be seen now as a sexual identity as an identity it makes certain moral demands that one not reject it appreciated push people aside because of it right and you get this issue is really transformed and it's as indeed great many issues a sexual ethic are transformed by this kind of marriage or interweaving with the ethic of authenticity now now here you get a tremendous destabilization of various religious forms in the West because the the work of reform as we saw earlier identified Christian life with a set of codes and particularly a roller tightly defined sexual code and this again the drift of the reform movement is to make that code also not simply that demanded by Christian faith but to make that code something which is part of normal life in a well-ordered society right so that the Christian sexual code slides towards what's considered normal and so therefore you get the coding of homosexuality is abnormal as deviant in that in that sense and not something which is which is normal and you even get a kind of scientist a shin and in American 19th century and else even elsewhere in other words scientific attempts to discover what really is sexually normal and masturbation is to be dangerous for etc etc so that you get a kind of over or determination of what is the right sexual morris which you can come at either from ethical Christian or scientific perspective and and get some very large overlap not not not entirely now so these this kind of that's called it sixties a revolution upsets a great many of those notions of normalcy but it also upsets of course the any established forms of Christian life and it also which is the important context mister I look at it also multiplies ANOVA I mean there's an whole set of new positions here that one can adult that a new kind of register our positions to do with the issue identity and how we should treat differences of identity and so on this whole you like the questions of multiculturalism come on the agenda and immensely complicate earlier questions which are already there the social conflict etcetera which are now seen in this new register as well as in the old register and so now what has this done well let me see look at the dime and see what we can actually deal with I like to say two things one very quickly and we can have questions on it another I'd like to work out a little bit more the thing I'd like to say relatively quickly is that description of this new predicament were in as a result of the creation of the immanent frame and the new destabilization of earlier forms that we see in the sexual revolution and the authenticity ethic of authenticity is that we live in its imminent frame and there is a choice between seems to be offered between living yet as all there is and living it as something that points to leads us to can allow us to open ourselves to something beyond but you can see this is something relatively unprecedented in human history because of this clear cut between imminent and the transcendent if you live in a world in which the forces from beyond are always in a certain sense breaking through let's go back to the enchanted world at 1500 of those peasants in England and France beating the bounds of the parish right if you're living in this world in which these forces the spirits can so negatively impact on you and the powerful magic that you confined to defend yourself against this is one that belongs to the church that is sacraments and so on the the sense of your life being impinged upon by something beyond the imminent frame is overwhelming the lived experience if you like for those people was overwhelming the possibility even for all of them of doubting the existence of things that they as they are just feel it the experience doesn't exist if however you're living in this imminent frame it's very different you could even say that where the situation there tilts the playing field as it were towards some kind of faith maybe not an orthodox lon maybe heretical one it's all but towards some kind of faith you could say now that perhaps the playing field tilts a little bit in the other direction it's perhaps very very easy to live this in an frame as all there yes I'm not even sure that that's true however because the second feature of this life in the immanent frame is that very important interpretations of ways of living it have been offered have constituted massive movements churches and groups around them and within sometimes within these within these groups it gets to be totally obvious so that you know if you move in certain circles around people like Dawkins and so on it just totally all this there's nothing else beyond and if you move in other circles people say oh I mean it's obvious there's much more than that etc so the notion of it even playing fields may be the wrong notion but I think we have to understand our situation in that light well now I'd like to go on just a little bit further having tried to describe what you see this is what I would like to think of as secularity or secularity 3 as I put it in my book in other words it's not there is a way of talking about the secular in terms of the retreat of religion from the public sphere and as a way of talking about it in terms of the decline of faith and practice and there's been some of both of those interesting enough as far as the second is concerned much more in certain societies than in others which is very confusing I mean if you look if you moved from the USA to East Germany I take that part of Germany yes even though it's no longer a separate political entity but I mean it's extraordinary the degree of God of generalization of atheism in that that society there's a fantastic difference and I think sociologists would give their right arm to really thank you maybe he has the secret or understanding why one so different but I have to confess that in the next edition Bible I'll try to solve this problem but I mean definitely these facts have occurred I want to point to something which is underlying all that and that's what I'm calling secular that's that the general condition in which belief and unbelief coexist together which I'm describing as this condition of the modern imminent frame and which is very different from the condition of let's say Europe and 1500 that I tried to describe it then I think we have to get a handle on I'd like to talk a little bit now though about what kinds of religious forms new religious forms this has encouraged or made possible because in a certain sense a lot of our contemporary conflicts turn on these well there is one category black boy I start putting but I mean that's distracting there isn't forget there is one category where if you mean if you look at the various facets of religious life liturgy prayer feasts parish activity and so on there are a couple of things like to pick out which are modes of prayer or devotion or spiritual discipline that people may enter into in order to achieve spiritual growth as the understanding I mean for a ortho sufficient beginning closer to God but it can be described in other ways by other people and of course there are also works of beneficence of philanthropy of charity which are religiously inspired I mean like you know Lao shoves all that yeah or mother theresa's order and so on and so on right and these have always been going on but talking about the new phenomena there are new forms and striking ones that are occurring at Lau as an example all around us that's one very important feature of religious life today there are two others that I think are very important and that are again quintessentially modern because the condition for their occurring is modern one is the interweaving of something to do with religion be it conditionality or some religious identity and so on with political the political nationality with political entities you see modern mobilized political entities the ones that exist in this new world where they're constructed and particular ones that are democratic they require something that I call collective identity some sense of what we're organizing around an immunise the American Republic organized around those principles that were enunciated in the in the Declaration of Independence or in other cases people organize around a certain historical linguistic identities as a Czech Republic this is a Polish Republic and so on or some mix of the two this is a democratic center-right and so there are these political identities have what people call markers and what the word poll that defines what what we're organized around now it's country the case that in many many cases religious or confessional markers have been crucial I mean think of Polish nationalism Irish nationalism French Canadian nationalism way way back a few centuries decades ago which organized around a Catholic identity or or I mean you know they're talking about even the NASA and British identity in the in the 18th century being Protestant very much by Protestantism and so on and so on so there are these identities and I've coined this word which horrify as many people so neo der communes and forget that because I I nearly get shot and so my sociology departments for taking taking this name in vain Emile execute but the idea being that that the the sense of what unites us is something which can be understood in religious terms or confessional terms and this is a very powerful niche that religion if you like can a dog which is quite different from the the sphere in which different spiritual movements may coexist in a given Church its whole role in our lives can be very different if it's also like in Poland you know what unites us together in this far goal against of course in the Polish case the struggle goes against you know the Protestants in Berlin and Orthodox in Moscow and then the Atheist North Austin San Petersburg and the atheist and Moscow there's a lot of enemies right but it's very firmly entrenched and in a way I would like to argue that the early American Republic had something of this kind and they whereas there was a I think to me the language of the Declaration of Independence breathes a certain kind of providential design notion and this Republic is living up to that providential design and then you get spin-offs from this which are if you like mmm non faiths counter definitions like in the case of John French Jacobin is a right or a French republicanism which sees itself in a struggle with another group which does have a very clear would adjust the identified marker class make friends and so in a certain sense a a certain kind of lay philosophy becomes itself a quasi-religious if you like a marker so that that has been a tremendously important feature of the modern world third important feature besides these movements of spirituality on one hand and this choosing of or this religion becoming a marker is a sense that religion or confessional faith but can become connected to our sense of moral or civilizational order so you get very often people have said in the last couple of centuries you know that look Jeffrey Cox puts it in May it's really interesting book on originating and society would fall apart without morality morality was impossible without religion and religion would disappear without the churches that was a very very common idea so now we get another niche as it were in which religion is seen as our religious life regardless of different kinds of spiritual forms it might have but then it had seen as tremendously important because without that the whole thing would fall apart and of course in a sense this is old because piety and order have very often gone together and the upper classes had wanted to be able to preach to the lower classes in order to stop then threatening the order but something new in a society in which everybody was theoretically of the same faith and it was just a matter of as if we're trying to get the more by sensuous and undisciplined to be slightly more disciplined in a society in which there is plurality of religious belief or even also unbelief the thing is presented in a rather new light this religion this is the one that's essential for civilization order on those other positions be they religious or not our threat to it in a way a little bit like at the heightened sort of Protestant identity in America in the 1840s and 50s Catholics were seen very unwashed tummy order from Arvin and what are they gonna do to us or in the way that a lot of people it seems to me on the so-called Christian right in the US politics describe describe other other people so you get that very powerful interweaving you see that's in other words we have these two kinds of interweaving of religious faith religious life confessional belonging with the political order among level and with a sense of the necessary bulwark of morality and therefore civilizational order on the other level and these things can play out in a great number of combination but let me just there's a wonderful quote from in this 1880s the Duke of Devonshire in England which I I think captures this very well the Duke said to his audience and he was raising money for church charities can you imagine for one moment what England would have been like today without those churches and all that those churches mean certainly it would not have been safe to walk the streets all respect decency all those things which tend to make modern civilization what it is would not have been in existence you could imagine what we should have had to pay for our police for lunatic asylums for criminal asylums the charges would have been increased hundredfold if it had not been for the work the church has done and in doing is doing today I suppose that speech ended saying you know give generously and you can see but forget the particular purpose of this this is obviously this is something which he expected his audience to find evidence I mean he didn't expect his audience to find a surprising he just wanted to remind them of it because he wanted them with that in mind to open their their purse strings maximally but that that is a tremendous and you get there of course this whole thing I talked about yesterday the interweaving of the idea Christian order with order as such civilization order for spreading it around the world and so on that is a particular powerful form of that and so you get that a very great mix of different combinations I mean there are some cases where people hold on to this notion of my character of my religion as necessary for civilizational order but it's not necessarily a marker of our particular society I'm sure I mean Belgium Catholics would have this have had this view at various times about you know the necessity of the church for civilizational order but not necessarily it's not necessary a marker of Belgium anyway in modern times I mean of course it was back then when they were over against Holden as as such or you can get the notion of our church is a marker of our nation with a very powerful idea that it's a market of civilizational order as perhaps in Ireland but you can also get combinations where these two go together and I dare say I mean I will say that okay I'll sneak up on this with another example I mean as in certain kind of German call to replace Don T's most in the 19th century you know in which the well the order of civilization came through Protestantism and then through this kind of liberalization of Protestantism and that is both what makes civilization go to its highest and fullest and fastest but it's also for many of them the marker of proper German nationalism you know going along with go along with Bismarck and this cool tool comes because you know this other Catholic stuff is really a menace to Germany and proper order right so you you can get all sorts of combinations of these things and now I would say that a certain part of what is called the Christian Rite in America we have something like this mix is it's both for many of them a marker and what America ought to be and it's essential to morale and civilizational order now you can see how this can be tremendous source of battles this understanding of course is part of what makes the plurality of religious faiths so difficult to live and allows it so easily to swing off into tremendous battles and now if we can just look beyond the West I've been talking purity of the West but we can see that we're now entering onto a phenomenon that's 20th century phenomenon and has wider significance I mean just think of Islamism in the original say Islamism in the original sense of the ideology of the Muslim brother is where something this is very modern ideas new idea that Islam has a kind of formula offers a formula for social organization rival to liberalism Marxism and songs a rather new idea and this can this of course is the is something analogous to what I call a civilizational moral implication of Alberta just faith but it also can become quite a national one how well because we we have tremendous importance of these national mobilizations in our world particularly very often because earlier forms of social identity are breaking down or breaking up and under pressure of you know all the things we were talking about earlier urbanization industrialization and song which destabilized earlier forms but also because of a very powerful feature that some nationalisms easily get into the feature of we are victims of this other great power the other great force which is threatening us and undermining us and destroying our culture and you get a very interesting and confusing phenomenon because this kind of nationalist if you like organization occupies the same space as certain kinds of today of religiously markered organization i mean to take the arab world that sense of being put upon by the colonialists and having to strike back and fight back the torch was carried for a long time by a supposedly secular movement secular movements and Nasser's egyptian socialism and the bath the various versions of the bath party in syria and and and iraq well very similar objections and very similar mobilisation similar in their targets similar in their sense of who's threatening them is now being picked up by among other things with various you know offshoots of the muslim brothers like like Hamas or various other jihadi movement so we get a in the world in the world seen a kind of galloping development of this this phenomenon I mean another quite to maybe I can make another leap and other who would be the BJP in India prints but it's these are all very different from each other they are very different in the connection between that kind of mobilization and various kinds of devotion sometimes it's almost no connection at all as there is in the case of the BJP except instrumental sometimes and sometimes there is but this poses a very very interesting set of issues I just want to close with these issues because it could be argued my my own views are but you gotta creep out here but it could be argued it's kind of weasel way of saying that this kind of integration of faith life in political and civilization of moral beliefs changes center of gravity of faith as a matter of fact it makes a whole lot of issues of power prestige who is on top who's dissing whom become absolutely central view a lot of the religiously inspired rhetoric in today's world is full and we have to get get back at them and this shift in the center of gravity can be at the expense of other forms of spiritual life as we can see in a whole lot of cases where our various kinds of Sufism princes have been targeted by a jihadist movements I mean I leave you with one last thought I mean perhaps one of the greatest expressions of Hindu piety in the twentieth century I'm speaking about Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated by one of these political religious movements the RSS behind the BJP that dramatic event Brett says a great deal about what but what this kind of development possibly represents for our our world so I've tried to give it a picture of the the situation that we're in spiritually the kinds of movements that are going forward and we can understand is going forward in that situation and pose some questions about what we feel what all that well thank you very much for your very kind attention thank you very much as with the past two days we have a half hour for questions and discussion there's a mic in the center aisle people can queue up there and I'd ask you to please introduce yourself briefly and keep your questions short so that we have as much time as possible for discussion I just want to fill that fill a space while people are coming up with something and television to say but my name is Paul Grenier and I'm not part of the Academy here but I'm wondering whether you could respond to an intuition I've had seeing some very devout Christians that I know personally in some of whom I actually admire but why see as having a great deal of resentment that this central cultural civilizational phenom phenomenon which they they love and know very well well see demeaned why what you're saying as having obvious events of circularity and I'm gonna use a word which will seem offensive but I despite my admiration for some of these thinkers and some of them in fact friends there seems to be a tendency towards something I can't help but call a kind of an analogue to the fascist a point of view of the of the mid-nineteen early 1930s or mid 1930s also you know the same sense of what we had has been destroyed mmm a great hatred for those who destroyed it in a real role hatred and almost frustration because of their faith with with their own hatred and insert the and you have people like there's a whole theory now of sort of American Vista fascism Chris Hedges writes about that a lot as analogous to some fascism as theirs see would you think that it's warranted to use where there it's a kind of a violence I mean it comes out of this which is which is quite dangerous well I mean I agree with you I think we've got to watch the look closely at the fascist and analogous fashion but I certainly agree with you that in lots and lots and lots of places you have this tremendous sense of awe son I've even say that Nietzsche and were about Santi Martin got real resentment against what they see is an attack or a dissing or I got contempt for their position and I think that's you know very very true this this society now it's also true that that was one of the great talking points of depreciating us and so on but it doesn't need to lead to that and doesn't necessarily lead to that but it does it can lead quite apart from any movement into fascism but even if there is none such it can lead to a very I think self stultifying attitude of we are victims and we have to strike back and so on and I would I mean frankly I've come out of the shell I was arguing you know that this kind of thing leads one to betray one's own very often betray ones sources of one's own faith I mean when it becomes you know Gandhi was killed because he wanted to hand over the there half of the gold stock to Pakistan it was a matter of his be willing to decrease the power of the Hindu so go ahead do you think in this way something is gone got lost so without bringing in the fascist knowledge I think you have a really very very dangerous feature in our modern world now we can generalize it that there's a whole lot of identities that feel you know not only religious identities that work themselves up into feeling depreciated and sometimes the mainstream media or the top media can collaborate in this by doing things that that create that so you really need both sides to I'm thinking something like this these famous Muhammad cartoons film in Denmark people argued at the time there's freedom of speech freedom of expression absolutely right but it doesn't mean this is a wise move this is an appalling move to make in a society where there's a hundred thousand Muslims who are among the weakest most vulnerable people you know it's just disgusting that this right-wing paper I still can't forget that should we make a big thing at their expense it's just not a move in a civilized game of mutual understanding and so what I was calling on I was in Germany at the time there's huge arguments with people like D bell to be published and I said I'm not saying you don't the right to do it but we should all get up as one person and say this is not the way to have a dollar they should have been morally condemned by everybody for doing this but a but legally allowed absolutely but I mean so there are cases where you want to have a message for both sides but I agree with you one of the great dangers we're living is that kind of mutual misunderstanding and then resentment and anger my name's Greg bond and I'm a student here I was just curious as you talked about the the new forms of which religious religion takes in our identity both nationalism morality in this civilizational context how much of that do you actually think is a feature of the reorganization of the nature of religion in in human definition of their self and their identity and how much of it is using an existing language or existing tools to sort of create a new identity but not not necessarily refiguring the actual idea is that these people have a separate ideology if they want to explain and this provides a useful language in which they can do it that's a very difficult question to answer because I mean yeah in a sense you're asking us to be searchers of souls in a search it's a very good question helping it just very hard to answer I mean how much is this really like a kind of national pride looking for a reason that we can think of ourselves as superior to others and how much is it really you know something that comes from the depths of their of their devotion I suppose the best answer to this is to say which is not not really an answer but to look at it this way there is a tremendous gamut of cases because there are cases where the particular religious marker is purely historical let's take X Yugoslavia so Milosevic mobilizes the Serbs against the Croats and later on against the Balkans and there you have groups are refined by the original religious appurtenance Orthodox Catholic Muslim but I work from the loss of itches an atheist right and we see this throughout today it's very disconcerting today that people have purely historical reference but it's very powerful for them so fun some people say not European publishes not noted for their piety or for their the importance they give to God and the Constitution we can't let the Turks in well I mean it's as though we lost the siege of Vienna but just a minute wait a minute so so on one hand on the other hand you get obviously movements where it goes along with a very deeply felt piety right so and every conceivable shade in between it's very very very hard it's a phenomenon which is not easy to understand or to know how to deal with hello my name is Zahra Kazemi I'm with the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies here at Georgetown yesterday you described to us in broad terms the role of Latin Christendom in ironically leading us to a process of disenchantment in the historical time and today two of the themes that you've highlighted for us regarding human understanding is the emergence of a new social imaginary that results in a multiplication of positions and what I'd like to seek your comments upon is in this case the role of the discovery of the Americas of the new world and the effect that had on human consciousness in Western Europe and to what extent that can perhaps be seen as one of the pivotal historical events that set in motion much of what you've described to us in this narrative of modernity and secularity well I'm done struggling to this very interesting question I'm struggling to just to see the different dimensions of it I mean certainly the discovery of the so-called discovery of the Americas really shook European self-consciousness and so on because these were people that you know we're totally off the map that they'd had before and they had potentially very long histories going back that didn't connect with biblical history and so on and so on and then big issues were posed and you know the famous debates at in my youth it's all about whether these people were human beings like us or others and so on so obviously European consciousness was profoundly changed by that but I'm not sure that this was I'm gonna have to think about this and maybe I'll change my mind I think about it more but I don't see that as being closely linked to the development of the modern state with the social imaginary that has come to inhabit the Laurens State the social imaginary of of constructivism based on individuals and so on okay I'm obviously floundering here think more about this but that's as much as I can say at the moment and well-thought-out and I'd like to commend Georgetown for bringing you here you've suggested that a more refined master narrative could really be benefit in creating perhaps an awareness that more opportunities retrieval of spiritual resources but even though even if you were to prevail within the Academy you as a public intellectual perhaps suggest what's the process whereby that more refined more sophisticated well I've you know I thought a great deal about this recently is you probably know I was only Quebec government Commission I mean you'd event the first thing I'm gonna say is the situations are so different from society to society that I would always hesitate to say what we you know I think is a good idea for Quebec and I wrote with my coffee Eagle report presenting that what I think is a good idea for Quebec would be a good idea for you all here or for European societies I mean we we looked a little bit at that in our report and we really were tremendously conscious of the of the immense differences but what we found was that there were certain ways of bringing about mutual encounter exchange and therefore much better knowledge of each other between the different groups in our society and the many crises we were going through was partly because of a fantastic distance and ignorance on the part of you know keeping a Qantas soosh how do you turn on that things I mean old old stock Quebecers on one hand and recent immigrants particularly Muslims on the other but when you got them together and they began to explain themselves to each other you found some really quite remarkable changes so and particularly you found this much much more successful among people under 30 out of 35 people that were older than that so that is the that is the route that we would like to like to take in in Quebec but it's not and it's not very far distant from the route that they're taking in the rest of Canada but I you know I just don't know how to generalize this without going very deeply into your situation here I'm student here I was just wondering in developing in the modern period you've used like an analysis of philosophical trans in year after historical movements in Europe to kind of come to this understanding and then at the end of the lecture today you briefly tried to apply it to the Arab world and some examples in the Indian context and I was wondering if the understanding which is the result of sort of treatment of the European context do you think that is applicable or how useful it is an understanding I'm not sure how it is and that's yeah I mean I use a very good point you're making there there this is one of the great difficulties that only people with a lot of deep knowledge of the societies in aggression can answer you know it planed there plainly is some degree of influence I mean take Muslim Brotherhood type Islamism they plainly are taking on board what I'm calling the constructivist notion that we can make new societies and so on and there but there and they're proposing if there is a no exactly but it's an idea coming from the Islamic tradition and the original that cannot we can build on right so there is some kind of it's not an accident that it's occurring in the same world as this and the world in which European power is spread on the other hand it's as I said earlier when you get something that's analogous it's always on the base a different set of cultural resources than unless you know that very intimately you could easily rush to think that they're identical and I don't want to want to say that so but I it I just put forward this question these are obviously on the face of it analogous movements there's been some inter influence okay what what are the differences how are we to understand it and so on but your point is very well taken you have to be I think you have to be very careful here and thank you my name is Tom Antos I'm interested in welfare history particularly in Europe and it's always I've been curious about the discussion of whether there's a Christian tradition even underlying European Union institutions and values that debate on that and I just wonder from your point is there any way of talking about a Christian foundation in Europe without sort of falling into the trap was saying atheists and agnostics are Christian in spite of themselves in some way is there a separate identity that yet still has a foundation mmm-hmm yes I mean I think that it can be shown that a great many of the things that we hold in common today that is people who are atheists and non a theists and Christians and Muslims and Jews and so on the the whole ethos of human rights and democracy words that we hold in common historically there are very important Christian sources to this but there are also defining figures which made their contribution by criticizing very heavily in the Enlightenment period the then attempts to realize that by Christian churches right so it's a kind of joint product and nobody should really say this is all ours or all or all yours I mean it's just as wrong for Christian citizens entirely our terrain as for supporters of the Enlightenment to say you were just making a total mess of it and we introduced freedom and obviously neither of these is is right so what do we do about that well we have I think this is the part of roles that I really like we have something like an overlapping consensus going on where we're supporting this same roughly similar ethos for very different reasons and that does mean that we will have differences will you know apply it in detail differently because of these these differences but we have were condemned if you like your call Donnie it's what evening were condemned to work together in society and there are ways of doing this with civility and even productively and creatively by going on working at it and see if we can reach agreed applications you made the move today to liberalism and then the question was is this all there is yeah and of course the answer that you gave which is quite the found of course is the idea that people were still thinking seeking some t loss and the National answer of course was about kinship patriotism the transformation of religion to civic religion the idea of chosen as that you talked about me but then there were like other options that you presented one was of course authenticity in and of itself and that does not require the connectivity in that respect and the issues of loyalty and all the nation state will give and the other was the universal kind of approach and you ended your lecture by sort of attribute English few remarks to the Arab world the Muslim sense of violation that you kind of been feared was the was the bundle with these Muslim Brotherhood as if it comes from that but the very idea is of course that this rage of this discontent doesn't have the other three layers that you were talking about it doesn't have the layer first of all of the structure of the nation-state notwithstanding the changes that occurred as opposed of course to D - this tendencies by Gamal Abdel Nasser or whoever in the Arab all that the Baath Party as you mentioned on all the nationalists were trying somehow to push aside under the banner of circularity of a different nature socialist secularism but without religion that's why Christianity could have been part of the Arab nationalist movement into something which was different secondly of course the very idea of denying the existence of the nation-state because of the Ummah the community of believers that does not believe in such boundaries these are boundaries that are violating just as the outsiders are violating and thirdly the lack of the question of authenticity so what is laughs is a universal vision but it's completely different because it's not derivative of what you describe is coming from lead from liberalism either to nationalism or to authenticity or to universalism it's a completely different story so I was thinking how do you lump them together because it was kind of a too much a fast move for me in the end well they were I'm obviously was much too fast cuz I didn't didn't mean to lump all that together no I'm just saying that there is a analogy between a certain move which has nothing to do with authenticity in the West the move of finding a marker the religious marker for one's political mobilization and what you see in the case of different phases in the art world now they're different because the Muslim brother Islamism certainly takes up something analogous to the idea of this is a right civilization of order and this is what what we need and what we need to solve our problems but it doesn't necessarily have the acute sense of resentment at the outsider however that can change over time and that gets to be a rivalry between this kind of identity and the Arab national identity and as you rightly point out they are not two identities which are fighting over the same units because one the original ambition of mass or knowledge to unite the whole Arab nation right and even that they've done whereas from the Muslim perspective it's the whole Ummah right so there are tremendous dissing allergies here because it isn't clear as in the case of nations like France Germany and so on and what it's pretty well clear what the unit is the issue is what identity are we going to share within this unit in this case there are these great differences into what what the unit is that one's trying to July liberate or reorder so there are just tremendous dis analogies here but the point I'm getting to is that is something quite new in the notion that you confine in the Quran and the Muslim tradition something which does exactly the same thing as liberalism and or Marxism does for Western Westerners who are looking at a model on which to construct a good society right it's the idea is that Islam could fill that function is something which is quite new in history and it's one of the ways in which of course this whole movement deviates very much from the Islamic traditions from Islamic notions of authority etc etc and my question is is perhaps just a clarification about what what might have motivated doing so as I've been listening for the last several lectures I've heard that this is a story of addition and change they're not teleological and certainly not necessarily progressive it's not a deterministic story you're trying to tell but there are logical reasons that the experience human experience cashed out the way that it did through each one's each stage in the stadia you've been providing at the end we end up with the individual as a locus of meaning an individual who's embedded in a horizon something akin to a galleon an ethical way of life a stance taken in the world and so I've been listening and and over and over again I've been struck by Hegelian parallels and I know you've written on Hegel and I wonder to what degree if you can offer some specifics that Hegel's thought was a motivation to you and to what extent was inspiring to this project and to what extent you see your way or see your project going beyond use well it's it's quite different but you're quite right I mean there are certain ways in which what Hegel did gave me obviously saw me was you know source of certain ideas I've tried to work out no not only Hegel I mean something like reactio against objectives spirit has some overlap with my term of social imaginary plainly weird because it's it's an understanding of things which is entrenched in the practices and institutions of that given phase of civilization but of course what totally is lacking here is as you pointed out a notion of this Abbot etiology running through the whole process okay but the point of this getting the story right is the extent that I'm doing that way of trying to get the story right is to understand our options more clearly see if there are certain ratchet effects where you can't go back then it's a big mistake to make it your major objective - as it will reverse them and if you do that you possibly miss the opportunity to make some very creative steps in the present situation now I mean I suppose that a big I mean a very simple statement of a very big upshot that I think comes out of all this is that the Christendom experience is over I mean there were a great thing by christen and what I mean I mean a whole society whose political structure whose culture whose ethos is profoundly imbued and centered and inspired by a given Christian confession you know I'll see anything France was a bit of Christendom Christian society everything made sense in those terms now we're just much too diverse today to have anything of that kind and the attempts to re-entry established bits of that are I think not only futile but potentially destructive so you know I'm either right about this time I'm wrong but you can see that important things ride on getting the story right and that's why it's worth doing hi my name is Tristan Mabry I'm here in the department of government at Georgetown and I apologize I came in late but it was your fault I see okay it was your fault because I was teaching a class / and it's not your fault I was late it was your fault I was in the class I decided to go into politics as a discipline largely because I was one of your undergraduates at McGill and I know how hard it is to keep track of students and there's no way you would remember Who I am but I was in the Leacock building in your series on the history of intellectual thought back in the early 90s back in the heyday of Quebec separatism which is also relevant and I wanted to bring you here because it's good to see you and you're looking very well thank you very much very brief question and it's again probably your fault I was sensitized to a kind of perspective on politics and communal politics studying first McGill and then later in England at the School of Economics and then coming into the US and and going through a PhD and studying politics it's practiced in this country I keep finding myself asking if there isn't something that I've been brainwashed into because I keep asking the same questions because when I look into questions of communal politics whether it's ethnic national or religious I seem to find that the assumption is that the solution and what's best in normative terms is the liberal solution and I don't see that when I look at authors like Margaret Morgan linka or yourself in Canada or for people who look at other kinds of consociational politics they tend to be Irish etc etc do you think there's anything exceptional maybe that's something that happens to Americans when they pledged allegiance that makes liberalism axiomatic and automatic and that actually can bubble up through the the discipline of political science in the u.s. yeah that's a very difficult question to answer in those terms let me rephrase the question but there there are certainly certain features American policy and it's so its own social imaginary which if you stay within them and they make certain solutions certain moves very obvious as soon as you leave the borders of this Republic and go to another situation these things very often appear not at all obvious and sometimes not very suitable anyway for these other other conditions but I think you know it's a misfortune of being such a powerful country that you sometimes lose a little bit sight of other things that are going on across the borders I think that's true but whether one shouldn't I think use the necessary the word liberty there's a certain conception of liberalism certain way of living liberalism here which is very different from our situations totally different from that and when people try to apply the nostril that I worked out here they just don't work I mean probably the reverse is the same the verse is the case as well that's why I didn't want to advise the previous speaker hi my name is Panetta Chang I am from philosophy department I have questions about religion and human right I remember I read some of your readings saying that there may be overlapping consensus on human rights the norm of human rights can be universal but there can be different justification from different cultures and religions but um then here is my questions I have actually two questions the first one now from time to time it seems that from some cultures just like I'm from China so I'm from Chinese culture it seems that some people believe we can never wish consensus on some particular human right just like our freedom of speech or Western democracy so-called Western democracy we can never wish consensus on this concept or long even though maybe we can get consensus on some other things just I write Against Torture or something like that so um I wonder if we cannot really get a consensus and pre-record on some particular human right then whether you think that there are still some way for us to get our freedom of speech or democracy in China or other peace in the world that is whether there are some Universal justifications for this kind of human right and then the second related question will be whether that particular universal just a person of human rights can be come from so co-create our Christian philosophy or body speaking from the Western liberalism thank you no I mean the article you're referring to I mean our point was there that it's be composable to have a consensus between different societies on the actual rights are written into the law and that can be retrieved through courts while having a very very different view on why these are the fundamental rights and I try to give an example if a Thai Buddhist example they don't so I think that's certainly possible but now you were talking about something that you were talking about the fact that doesn't look like anytime soon the government in China is going to agree with people in other parts of the world about what human rights are actually to be guaranteed and what go and say about that I mean I certainly I would find it much much happier world and we if they could find their way to do that but we'll have to see how things work out whether they're kind of leadership from on top is actually going to make it's gonna be viable in China as it's developing which is not not clear we'll just have to go up to see and we'll have to we I take note of the fact also that this kind of very powerful nationalism I spoke to about I spoke about earlier with a very strong sense of being depreciated by outsiders is also very powerful fact in China today so that rational discussion about treatment of Tibet became very quickly impossible and we can see that there's a lot of work yet yet to be done we have to hope that the communication gets better anyway in the near future even if we don't come to an immediate agreement well let me just close with a few remarks and make some thanks we've covered a lot of ground here I think it's fitting that we began a couple of days ago several centuries ago and have ended up addressing some of the most burning questions of our contemporary era now that we have come to the end of this series I want to again extend some thanks first to my staff the Berkley Center staff in particular Amanda Gant melody Fox Ahmed and Annie Hunt who played an instrumental role in organizing this series along with my colleague Jose Casanova I'd like to also thank all of you for participating and invite you to continue to participate in to observe engage with the work of the Berkeley Center in the months and years to come and of course I'd like to invite you to join me in thanking professor Taylor for sharing his time and thoughts with us

Channel: Berkley Center

Views: 21,816

Keywords: Charles Taylor, Philosophy, Secularity, Narrative, secularization, spirituality, religion, faith, politico-religious, Western

Id: WV9c4mVTalc

Length: 94min 8sec (5648 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2013